The Road Toll

I could ask myself why we even have a high road toll to begin with. After all there are better roads always being built, more traffic lights and roundabouts, safer cars and the peachy wonderful caring times we live in.

I didn't ask myself because I believe I already know the answer and that is no matter how good the infrastructure is bad drivers will undermine the best of efforts and cause carnage. Often I will see bad driving and I wonder how it is that the road toll isn't higher. Someone of my former acquaintance would always tailgate other vehicles, sms while driving, drive too fast through car parks, ignore the signs in the car park such as the no entry signs and ignore you when you shouted warnings.

This person once crashed into the back of some one that they were tailgating and apparently blamed the other driver for stopping suddenly. When it was mentioned to the tailgater that they were supposed to leave sufficient space for such a situation the tailgater just ignored it and continued with their same driving habits.

A colleague of mine told me that when they were recently driving long distance they were nearly hit by a careless driver, they were on a winding stretch of two lane terrace highway. He noticed some headlights briefly appear behind a semi trailer coming the other way. Although there was an unbroken line between the lanes and there wasn't much room for him to pull over due to the guard rail at the edge of the road he got out of his lane as much as he could just in time to see the semi coming around the blind curve and the headlights from behind the semi now overtaking the semi on the blind curve. If my colleague hadn't noticed the headlights up ahead and moved over he could have been wiped out all because someone couldn't be bothered to obey the road rules.

And really, just everybody obeying the road rules is all it would take to reduce the road toll.